Welcome to the Doll House

My next therapist needs to be much more up-to-speed on pop culture and media than the one I just had. It's a true necessity because of the way my mind works. I understand and explain things through analogies. When an analogy isn't immediately available, I relate all situations to either a movie, a book, a TV show, or a song.

When I started with this therapist, I got frustrated in the beginning because she just didn't understand how I put information together in my head. Granted, I was so hypomanic (mixed state, actually), I was somewhere off in the stratosphere. I talked so much and so fast, my face hurt from trying to keep up with the neurotransmitter traffic in my brain. Warp speed, Mr. Zulu! Brain eruptions aside, my therapist just hasn't seen enough movies or listened to enough lyrics or internalized enough of her TV viewing. People who claim they never watch TV or, even worse, don't own a TV irritate me on principle. I love TV. Love it.

In the past week or so when I've been feeling so goddam awful about myself, one movie keeps coming to mind: Welcome to the Dollhouse. The main character, Dawn Weiner, is as big a misfit and as just as unappreciated in her family as I was in mine. When I rented the movie, my husband said it was painful to watch a character struggle the way Dawn did. My heart ached for her. I wanted to reach out and say, "Sweetie, hang in there. They'll never love you and you'll always be more interesting than they will: Two absolute truths." It may be painful to watch, but this movie is a gem and one of the most insightful stories about being a misfit middle child ever produced. Heather Matarazzo should have gotten an Academy Award. Which isn't to say that Jessica Lange didn't kick ass in Blue Sky (I am sure her character had raging bipolar disorder). Or was that the year for Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking? I'm too lazy to look it up.

I digress. I never related to a movie the way I did with We,come to the Dollhouse. The only other character I totally understood and who I felt would understand me was Ugly Betty in the first season.

Both Dawn and Betty have a lot in common (other than Eric Mabius), but nothing more than their awkward, out-of-step, trying-too-hard demeanor, the work they put into trying to fit in, and their never-pretty looks. I get it, boy, do I get it. I only hope Betty meets a kinder fate than Dawn (and to find out what that is, you need to rent Palindromes).